Like all excellent ideas, this one started in the pub. I was out for drinks and dinner with a few of the members of my games club, when an intriguing question was proposed; if you could have one magical wish that would compel the other members of the club to collect themed armies and play in a campaign of your choice, what campaign would you wish for? My answer was easy. A Badab War Kill Team campaign.
Eyes around the table lit up. “You don’t need a magic wish for that!” they told me. So here we are!
Some ask why we lament the execution of our duty. We do not. We lament that our duty is necessary at all. – Brother Heamis
I’m pleased with how my first Marine has turned out, but slightly embarrassed to note that many of the others in the club have finished their entire kill teams in the time it took me to make a single model!
I wanted to start with a basic tactical marine just to make sure I could get everything ‘right’, before moving on to specialists and the leader. But even though he’s ‘just’ a tactical marine I still wanted to allude to the fact that he would be taking part in some brutal ship-to-ship fighting and also hint at that Blood Angel ancestry. This is why I eventually settled on the pose of being in the middle of drawing his knife.
I knew from the outset that I wanted my kill team to be both ‘true scale’ and to have a retro vibe. Not only is the Badab War set in 40K’s “past”, but the original campaign narrative was first conceived in the early 1990s. Thankfully true scaling is a lot easier these days thanks to plastic Primaris Marines. No mucking around with Terminator legs any more if you don’t want to!
As you can see from the WIP picture below, the model is based around a plastic Primaris Marine. I was careful to remove and resculpt any details that were obviously ‘Primaris’, such as the rims around the knee pads and the stabilisers on the ankles.
I used Reiver arms as these are less bulky than Primaris arms, since they lack the forearm ‘bracers’ that the Primaris have, and therefore look more old school. It also gave me access to ready-made arms in the process of drawing the knife.
To paint the yellow, I tried something a little different from the technique I used on my Imperial Fists. It basically went like this:
- Corax white undercoat
- Averland sunset base
- Cassandora yellow shade in recessed
- Yriel yellow (two thin coats)
- Flash Gitz yellow edge highlight
- Dorn yellow final edge highlight
The chapter icon was an interesting challenge. I used an old Space Marine campaign badge transfer – a black skull in a black circle – applied over a white shoulder pad to get the central circle right. Then I painted over the skull in white and painted the heart in freehand (Khorne red then Evil Suns red).
Next I filled in the chequered pattern. I did this by ‘sketching’ in roughly where the black squares should be, then going back and painting the black more solidly, followed by any touch ups of the white where I’d made a mistake. I know some people like to draw in a grid for cheques and then fill in alternate squares, but I find that can leave the black squares larger than the white due to the thickness of the grid lines.
LED Eye Lenses
Of course I had to add my customary LED helmet eye lenses. My tutorial is here if you’re interested and haven’t seen it already.
As an experiment I applied a thin coat of Spiritstone red technical paint to the eye lenses. This doesn’t do anything to hinder the light when the LED is on, but makes the eye lenses look red when it is off, as seen in the image below.
That’s it for Lamenters and Badab for the moment, but there are still six more models to come. It should be a fun campaign, in addition to my Lamenters the rest of the games club already have Astral Claws, Space Sharks, Sons of Medusa and Salamanders kill teams underway. If you’d like to see my good friend Apologist’s Astral Claws kill team then his blog is here. Stay tuned for more Badab action over the coming weeks and months!
Chris Buxey Paints 